The Daddy Banjo Remembered

The following was posted here in 2000 by John Pollock. 

When I first crossed paths with Frank Davis, in 1965, he was playing guitar and singing as part of a duo called Frank and Kay, performing their somewhat twisted "folk" repertoire in Houston coffee houses, ice houses and the occasional art gallery. The act broke up when Kay left town upon the long odyssey which culminated, twenty years later, in her overnight success as country singer/songwriter K. T. Oslin.

Bereft of his duo partner, Frank turned his imagination loose upon the problem of performing solo. When I next saw him, around 1970, he had created the world's first Daddy Banjo.

After dismembering a Fender Stratocaster (the same one, he claimed, heard on the circa1960 instrumental hit record "Raunchy"), Frank reassembled it-- with a snare drum for a body. Two of the guitar's three pickups sensed the vibrations of the strings; the third pickup he fastened to the bottom head of the drum, now the back of the Daddy Banjo, to pick up the vibrations of the snare. More about this below...

Inside the drum, Frank mounted a bass drum pedal. A string attached to the pedal emerged from a hole in the rim and terminated in a loop around his foot, which was thereby empowered to create the Backbeat from Hell. But wait... there's more!

Protruding from the rim was a gooseneck, which supported a microphone, which fed a mixer mounted mostly inside the instrument; mostly, because the controls sported knobs of the type common on mixing boards of the 1950s, which is to say that they were about two and a half inches in diameter. These knobs sprouted from the rim like a row of mushrooms, leading away from the gooseneck. The audio output of the instrument went to the house sound system-- but Frank controlled the entire mix himself.

Remember that pickup positioned to sense the snare? During a performance, Frank would laboriously tune the snare, by ear, to provide an amorphous drone sound, its pitch roughly centered on the root note of the next song's key. During this lengthy process, he would tell ethanol-fueled tales which never seemed to end, but of such hilarity that the song itself was often an anticlimax. In fact, sometimes during a story he'd change his mind about what the next song was to be. If that involved a different key, the retuning process would begin again. It was not unknown for Frank to play only two or three songs in an hour, but no one seemed to object...

Following a concert one evening in one of Houston's less fashionable districts, Frank was relieved of custodial responsibility for the Daddy Banjo, by a lover of the arts who, in the process, also relieved him of an upper incisor.